Agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries in the United States. An area of particular concern within the agriculture industry relates to the removal of grain from a grain bin. While there are many aspects of grain removal that make the activity hazardous, the use of a sweep auger in grain bins has been a significant hazard for decades. The risk is such that hundreds of people have been killed and many thousands of farm workers have been seriously injured since the introduction of sweep augers.
In agriculture, a sweep auger is generally known as a mechanism that attaches to a pivot point in the center of a flat-bottom grain bin, and travels at very slow speeds pivoting around the bin. As the sweep auger travels, grain is moved from the perimeter of the bin towards a floor sump in the center of the bin by a helical screw blade called a flighting. Once the grain is moved to the floor sump, the grain exits to another conveying system. Due to challenges that occur with and imperfections of the sweep auger, frequently, one or more workers enter into the bin behind the sweep auger to make regular adjustments to the auger to keep it advancing on track, and also to manually sweep grain not captured by the auger.
By design, a sweep auger is typically guarded from accidental contact on the top and backside, but it cannot be guarded on the front, or the fighting of the auger would not be able to contact the grain, and therefore, would not convey grain towards the center sump. In other words, the basic functionality of a sweep auger would be nullified if it were guarded on all sides.
Due to the hazards inherent to an exposed rotating/rotatable blade working inside a grain bin, and in view of the factual evidence of continual worker injuries and deaths associated with those hazards, the regulatory governmental agency for Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) issued regulations regarding the procedures that are to be followed by an entity when workers are involved with clearing a grain bin. For example, in 1987, the Grain Handling Standard included a general requirement about equipment inside grain bins stating, “All mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic equipment which presents a danger to employees inside grain storage structures shall be deenergized and shall be disconnected, locked-out and tagged, blocked-off, or otherwise prevented from operating by other equally effective means or methods.” In essence, the regulation restricted any worker from being in the grain bin while an auger was active. While the restriction surely improves safety, the restriction simultaneously created a host of complications for the industry. In particular, the amount of additional time and effort suddenly required in the process was significant if an entity was to remain in compliance with the regulation. Thus, the industry was left without any provision to address the use of sweep augers or the conditions in which an employee may work inside a grain bin with an energized sweep auger.
Over the years since the release of this regulation, many individuals and businesses have protested citations and made efforts to request additional guidance and/or changes to the regulations. Specifically, the industry requested that a determination be made to indicate what actions may be allowed and under what circumstances, in which an entity could permit a worker to be in the grain bin with an energized sweep auger. The efforts were mildly successful in that an exception was provided, subject to a list of explicit requirements. Nevertheless, due to both the difficulties involved with complying with the list of requirements and the absence of a viable alternative solution, frequently, individuals ignore the regulations and enter the bins, putting the entity as risk of an expensive citation and the safety of the individual, simply to get the work done.
A further complication to the issue above regards the era in which the grain bins were built. For example, the grain bins described above, having a built-in sweep auger, are bins that were built more recently. While there may be benefits to the more modern bins compared with older bins, sweep augers in the modern bins are not portable or readily transferable between different bins because they are fixed in a position to pivot within the bin. On the other hand, older bins, which either are unable to be or have not yet been retrofitted with a sweep auger, generally still require manual sweeping, which is more time-consuming than using a sweep auger and consequently less cost-efficient. Moreover, even without an energized sweep auger being used in the older grain bins, workers that have to enter the bins to manually remove the grain are still exposed to other hazardous situations including: suffocation, respiratory issues from the noxious gasses and particles released by the grain, injuries caused by falling or tripping over the grain, etc. Therefore, with or without a sweep auger in a grain bin, workers who enter the grain bin remain exposed to injury or death.